Dancing with Muddy, by Jerry Portnoy

Review by Terry Abrahamson

Dancing with Muddy

Author: Jerry Portnoy

Chicago Review Press

By Terry Abrahamson

Jerry Portnoy grew up in Chicago hearing the blues being played outside his father’s rug store on famed Maxwell Street during the late 1940s and early '50s. After dropping out of college, he became immersed in the colorful world of pool hustlers like Cornbread Red, and Minnesota Fats as he managed the largest pool hall in Chicago. During a stint as a paratrooper early in the Vietnam War, he applied for discharge as a conscientious objector, and lived in San Francisco during 1967’s "summer of love.” While bumming around Europe the following year, Portnoy heard the blues again on a record by Sonny Boy Williamson and instantly became obsessed with mastering blues harmonica.

He returned to Chicago and in 1974 he was playing in small Black clubs at night when Muddy Waters plucked him from his day job at Cook County Jail to fill the historic harmonica chair in his fabled band. Eric Clapton followed suit in 1991. In a career that took him from ghetto taverns to the White House and the Royal Albert Hall, he went from the raggedy vans and cheap roadside motels of the blues world to the private jets and five-star hotels of the rock world. Between those two very different gigs was a struggle to survive the vagaries of the music business and the pressures of life on the road.

Editor’s note: Here is our review of Jerry’s vivid memoir, penned by Terry Abrahamson, who also spent his youth on Maxwell Street and knew Muddy Waters very well. In fact, Terry was considered like family to the Morganfield clan and he co-wrote songs with Muddy that were famously recorded for his hit albums.  Their song “Bus Driver” went on to win a Grammy. Take it away, Terry…

            Maxwell Street. The Bootcamp of the Gods.  Sunday morning. 1953-ish. From the far side of the narrow curb-to-curb crush of pedestrians, right beside the alley, not-yet-deified Little Walter mellows it down a few notches as the crowd gets quiet for the voice leanin’  into the mic…

                        Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s star time!

                        So put your hands together

                        For the man who makes it

                        Oh so sweet beneath your feet….

                        You ladies know what I’m talkin’ about.

                        Talkin’ about the only man in Chicago

                        Who will sell you a rug

                        That works like a drug.

                        Put your hands together for the King!

                        I’m talkin’ the King of Carpets,

                        Aaron “The Champ” Portnoooooy!

            No, I didn’t hear it quite like that the first time he takes us back to the store his dad and grandpa Max Portnoy, the actual “King of Carpets,” ran, down at the crossroads:  Chicago’s legendary immigrant crossroads paved in schmaltz and chit’lin grease, where the Jews met the Blues. But by the time Jerry Portnoy all but begrudgingly backs into the Blues life, me and my hindsight were havin’ a good laugh, realizing the Blues had been there with Jerry from the beginning, -- starting with that “King of Carpets” bit that you know has gotta be beggin’ for the B.B. King Live & Well intro -- and never left him.

Not that it mattered.  Because by that time - near halfway through the book - we could care less if this wordsmith, who could make Roget drool, is following the path of Sonny Terry, Sonny Bono or Sunny von Bulow, because this is one helluva novel; a great novel of Chicago, a great novel of America. You know…for a memoire. Never mind; Nelson Algren knows what I mean. He’d love Jerry Portnoy.

            And right about now, the Blues Gods are lovin' Jerry Portnoy for a whole lotta reasons, not least of which is his nod to somebody a little less expected than Robert Johnson and Son House as an early influence.   But who needs Son and RoJo when, rising from the black and white TV to fill the Portnoys’ Albany Park frontroom was Blues God…. Liberace. “When I heard him play boogie woogie, I promptly announced to my mother that I wanted to take real piano lessons.” Ain’t that a man!

            In the most poetic convergence of the two historic cultures that define Jerry Portnoy, his disinterest (boasting of ditching Hebrew school religiously) in learning his Bar Mitzvah service Torah passage - to be delivered from the synagogue stage to the kvelling throngs -  forces Jerry to learn and memorize the Hebrew version as sung onto a phonograph record.

“It was great ear training and would serve me well years later, when I’d use the same

methodology to decipher Little Walter records.” And how do you spell “Juke?”

            Most vividly and immersively recalled among a battered suitcase full of pre-Blues lives played out against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the Summer of Love that wouldn’t quit, would have to be The Pool Hall Years. Rising from a dark corner pocket of East Rogers Park like the Lilac Vegetal vapors off of George C. Scott’s wilting tab collar, Portnoy’s memories school us, not just in the rules and strategies of both pocket and pocketless billiards, but in the nuances of the poolroom hustle, a trick shot’s cruel death at the hands of an unfamiliar table’s flaccid pocket pool cushion, and, of course, The Names, unearthed by a witness to history we can gratefully cherish as the sweet spot in the Venn Diagram where  Wimpy Lassiter, Cornbread Red and Minnesota Fats meet Shakey Horton, Fuzz Jones and Pinetop Perkins.

            Searching for an early exit from a military stint that included training as a parachutist and a medic, Jerry chose the path of Conscientious Objector - not his last dive into the genes that fitted his rug monger dad with a never-used Northwestern University law degree.  While discharged prior to achieving C.O. status, it was the gift of a harmonica to take along on a subsequent trip through Europe that ultimately, inevitably and irrevocably drew him to the music that rose - and endures - as an instrument of conscientious objection. Parlaying lessons from Sonny Terry and Big Walter into semi-regular slots with Johnny Young and John Littlejohn, into friendships with harp giants Rick Estrin and Paul Oscher, and finally into a years-long run as the heir to his fellow Maxwell Street alum Little Walter as the harp man for Muddy Waters.

            Bios of Chicago Blues sidemen don’t get a lot of shelf space at Barnes & Noble. Leave it to a paratrooper to set the bar at nosebleed altitude; there may not be another one for quite a while.  Guitar Junior, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Fuzz and Pine have personalities, histories, hearts, hungers and lotto strategies that get them through the endless miles and venues ranging from subterranean  ghetto dives to Queen Victoria’s Royal Albert Hall.  That chemistry comes alive - simmering, sparking and somehow elevating the one-time heir to the Plush Pile Carpeting Throne to the never sought-after role of backstage lawyer in a high tension standoff with the Mannish Boy turned Big Boss Man.  Artfully crafted with the same nail-biting suspense that drives Zayda Portnoy’s rooftop shtetl showdown with the Ukrainian cossacks of the Khmelnytsky pogroms, your heart breaks as the ‘70s most beloved Blues band fractures…with King Max’s boy deftly straddling the faultline.

            While nobody stayed on Muddy’s dance card forever, Jerry’s landing was

exceptionally soft, deposited on the wings of ka-chings with the Eric Clapton band:

six years of nights in luxury rooms and world class arenas, doing sets of Blues classics

like “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.” And business was never better….until the juices from that Blues Bug Bite worked their way through Clapton’s system, and Jerry Portnoy tried his hand at bandleading….a situation hard to refuse when the great guitarist Duke Robillard signs on to ride along…if only for a little while.

            These days, Jerry Portnoy lives off the revenue from his harp instruction  platforms; clearly more successful as a teacher than as the gifted Roosevelt High School student who “excelled at underachieving.”  Far from an underachievement, Dancing with Muddy overflows with history that rages, rises and sings to us from the thatched rooftops of Eastern Europe and from the dirt floors of the Delta, from the curbside Jewtown tip cans and from lushly leathered London limos, lit by the sparks of two intertwining immigrant journeys.  From start to finish,

Jerry Portnoy’s got his mojo working.  And it will definitely work on you.

For info or to buy the book: CLICK HERE

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Terry Abrahamson won a Grammy by writing songs for Muddy Waters. He helped launch George Thorogood’s career and created John Lee Hooker’s first radio commercial, which are just a few of his accomplishments. Terry also is a playwright. He and partner Derrick Procell are currently writing songs with Mud Morganfield, Nellie “Tiger” Travis, Teeny Tucker, and Big Llou Johnson. He authored the acclaimed photography book, In The Belly of The Blues – Chicago to Boston to L.A. 1969 to 1983 -- A Memoir and a children’s book, Blues Parade.